Random (mostly foodie tv) notes:

Royally pissed about the latest Top Chef; Leah totally should have packed her knives on this one. Carla is turning out to be absolutely hilarious.

Slowly warming up to Ted Allen's new show Chopped, which is like Top Chef meets Iron Chef in a dark room. Who was that contestant in this week's episode who was unclear on the concept and kept whining about the time constraints? Did he wander into the studio by mistake?

If you're on a diet, watch Man vs. Food on Travel Channel. Food has never looked more unappetizing. I DVR'ed the episode on Portland where he visited the Stepping Stone Cafe, Voodoo Donuts (of course) and Salvador Molly's. For those of you who live in Portland or thereabouts (and have cable), the episode repeats on Saturday at 8am. Salvador Molly's supposedly serves Indonesian food so we might have to check that out at some point.

Need to catch up on Lost and Gossip Girl. Not sure about whether I'm on board with Hell's Kitchen just yet.

In home cooking, I think I've moved from the garbanzo phase into a mushroom phase via that spicy cabbage soup. Most of the recipes I've pulled to try involve mushrooms in some major way. Will be trying a tofu mushroom stroganoff this weekend.

Two new things I've discovered Isis is afraid of:
1. the drawer under the oven where I keep the baking sheets
2. the plastic bag the paper comes in when it's raining

This weekend's assignment is to read Sonny Barger's biography to get in the right frame of mind for a client's game about biker gangs in the 60's. It's interesting though because a lot of the action took place very near to here in Oakland and Modesto and points in between. Also a good thing I just finished a potboiler about Tibetan monk horror on the plane back from Minneapolis because their other big triple-A title centers on that subject. We spent all day yesterday in LA mapping out plans for their 2009-10 lineup which grew quite suddenly by about 40 percent over what they'd been planning just a couple weeks ago.

One of our other clients who is currently on hiatus with us for unrelated reasons has been battling a boatload of lunatics over a sound file in a game that shipped over a year ago. We've been getting a lot of phone calls about this, and it has made for a very busy couple of weeks.